When it comes to control planes and management UIs for Docker containers, you’ve got plenty of options to choose from. Between its sheer number of container tools, built-in CI/CD pipelines, and support for everything from Docker and Podman to K8s, Portainer is the most common option out there. But if you prefer minimalist UIs, Dockhand and Dockge are just as reliable, with the former being my favorite ever since I ran into it a few months ago. But if you’re willing to install community plugins, you can even use Cockpit to control your Docker runtime.
That said, although every tool I’ve listed so far works well on laptops and desktops, smartphones are a different story altogether, especially if you stick to the default mobile layout on their web UIs. Fortunately, Docker Manager solves this problem by offering a solid mobile interface for controlling containers spread across multiple home lab nodes – and it’s the reason I’ve moved on from a Termux + SSH setup when troubleshooting my self-hosted apps from my smartphone.
Docker Manager provides a sleek mobile UI for container management tasks
And it includes all the tools I could ask for
My biggest issue with the mobile layouts on typical Docker management platforms is that they’re a bit of a pain to navigate. The default mobile UI is often too zoomed in, and I’d have to scroll past multiple settings to get to the logs or shell tabs when I need to troubleshoot things. But switching it to the desktop layout causes everything to get too zoomed out, and I’d have to constantly pinch my fingers when navigating through different tabs.
In contrast, Docker Manager is a dedicated application that fits the essential container management utilities into a neat UI that doesn’t look out of place on a smartphone screen. The Containers section includes the ID, image name, status, port mapping, resource consumption stats, and other details of my self-hosted stack, and I can use the menu button to check their logs, switch to a Shell UI, or stop/restart them.
Creating new containers is just as simple, as I can select the ports, environment variables, and bind mounts for my FOSS images. Likewise, I can pull OCI-compliant images directly from Docker Hub, or even build ones from scratch inside Docker Manager. The images, persistent volumes, and network devices have their own tabs at the bottom of the screen. My only complaint is that the last two should have a few more options besides Inspect and Delete for my storage volumes and network bridges. But seeing as how I probably won’t spin up complex containers from a smartphone anyway, I don’t want to go too hard on the app, especially since it lets me swap between different Docker servers with a single tap…
It can pair with multiple Docker instances
Including Docker servers running in rootless mode
As a hardcore home labber, I’ve got Docker servers configured on my MacBook, Raspberry Pi nodes, old laptops, virtual machines, and practically everything that can run containers. Luckily, Docker Manager can connect to every system in my arsenal, regardless of its underlying OS. Since the app uses an SSH connection to hook up to my Docker environments, I rely on passkey authentication to avoid the security loopholes of password logins. But if you’re a casual tinkerer, you can still use password authentication when adding a new environment to Docker Manager.
Speaking of security, I usually run Docker in rootless mode, and the mobile control panel has no issues connecting to these less privileged containerization environments. Heck, as long as I specify the Podman directory under the Docker CLI Path variable, I can even control, create, and configure Podman containers within Docker Manager, which is pretty useful as I’ve started to get accustomed to this FOSS runtime. In fact, I’ve added a couple of servers twice: once with the default settings for the Docker environment, and again with the Podman directory, just so I could manage both runtimes from the mobile app.
Apple Container turned my Mac into a self-hosting war machine
It’s hands-down the most resource-efficient method for running containers on macOS
Docker Manager can even control the host machine to some extent
It’s for quick troubleshooting when things go south
Since we’re on the subject of host machines, Docker Manager can also help debug problems with the underlying system. Besides pulling the system specs and resource consumption metrics for the host, it can also SSH directly into the machine, so I don’t have to switch to Termux just to run terminal commands.
Heck, it can even browse the directories on the host, which is pretty useful when I need to modify files inside my container’s persistent volumes. Since the app doesn’t let me modify Docker Compose files manually, I use the file browser to tweak variables in compose.yml files directly before executing docker compose up -d via the terminal as a workaround. That said, I’d recommend creating a user with low privileges for Docker Manager just to avoid security issues if you’re as paranoid as I am.
